In a development, the State government is now looking at a new site, between Cheyyar and Kancheepuram, for Chennai’s second airport.
The site is around 75 km from the existing airport, and it will take nearly two-and-a-half hours by road.
According to highly-placed sources, the file that had a shortlisted site for the second airport was sent to a top authority in the government, but it came back unsigned.
“Now we have been asked to inspect the new site between Cheyyar and Kancheepuram,” a source said.
Preliminary land survey
“We have alerted the Tiruvannamalai Collector to do a preliminary land survey,” he added. When asked whether the other site, Parandur, had been rejected, he said: “I can’t say that for sure, since the file has also not been rejected. But there seems to be an inclination towards the new site between Cheyyar and Kancheepuram now.”
To a query as to why this new site was now being considered by the government, sources said that they had about 1,500 acres in Cheyyar already.
“We want to acquire as less land as possible from private owners. So we want to explore the possibility to see how much land would have to be acquired if we choose the site between Cheyyar and Kancheepuram. We will ask the Airports Authority of India (AAI) to conduct another study to see if it is feasible and see the number of houses that would be affected if we were to choose this site,” another source told The Hindu .
The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has already said that the second airport would require about 3,500-4,000 acres to be able to handle the growing passenger traffic for a substantial amount of time.
AAI officials said if they are informed by the State or the MoCA, they would carry out another study for this site as well. The AAI had recently submitted a study weighing the pros and cons for the two sites for the second airport.
